ROCKPORT — Contractors plan to begin tearing down a building in Rockland on Monday to make way for a new home for the Center for Maine Contemporary Art.

The art center will move seven miles south to downtown Rockland in July 2016. The move signals the end of a long relationship between Rockport village, where the influential arts organization has been since it opened in 1952, and the beginning of a new chapter in the midcoast’s cultural hub.

Now vacant, the building that is coming down beginning Monday most recently housed four art galleries. Demolition and site cleanup should last a week, and the foundation for the new building will be poured the first week of November, said CMCA director Suzette McAvoy. Construction will last 18 months.

“It’s exciting to finally reach this moment,” McAvoy said. “We’ve been talking about it for a while, and now we’re finally moving forward.”

Designed by architect Toshiko Mori, the new building will include an open-air courtyard, large windows that will capture north-facing light, and more flexible exhibition space. Most of the exterior is graphite gray, with a glass wall lining the courtyard. It will feel industrial and modern, with high ceilings and a concrete floor.

CMCA hopes to raise $5 million for the project. It’s almost halfway there, McAvoy said. The public phase of the fundraising campaign will begin in the spring.

The move will enable the arts center to stay open year-round and increase its presence in the state’s cultural community, McAvoy said.

“It means we can reach a much larger audience, increase our opportunities and improve our exhibition space,” she said.

The new building will have three galleries on a single floor, ranging from 1,000 square feet to 2,500 square feet, and about 1,000 square feet of additional exhibition space. In Rockport, CMCA operates a three-gallery, three-story building in a village neighborhood with no room to expand.

At 21 Winter St., the new building will be one block from Rockland’s Main Street and close to the Farnsworth Art Museum, the Strand Theatre, commercial art galleries and the city’s active dining and nightlife scene. A municipal parking lot near the new building has several hundred parking spaces, while CMCA’s existing home has room for just five cars.

“The move and the construction of this building will allow us to better serve our mission, and that’s the key reason we’re doing this,” McAvoy said. “We want to further our mission of advancing contemporary art in Maine, and we want to reach more people.”

CMCA now attracts between 8,000 and 9,000 visitors annually. The gallery’s board hopes to quadruple its audience, reaching at least 35,000 people in the new location, and to increase the annual operating budget from about $340,000 to $550,000.